Obviously Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc. are federated decentralized equivalent to their centralized counterparts, but what is the counterpart in the fediverse to TikTok? It is a dominant app for millions of people, and as far as I can tell the closest thing is Peertube, but isn’t that more of a YouTube equivalent? Does it not exist because the bandwidth and storage costs are just too great? Or because the algorithmic nature of content selection is inherently anti-fediverse in some way? Clearly many people choose to interact with each other this way, but it seems like a gap in the fediverse and I was wondering why.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Peertube as you said is the closest equivalent as a video distributor. Technically a similar approach to Peertube would work by using both Torrents and Instance data storage. Now what makes Tik Tok so popular is its algorithm, which mind you, is a tiny wee bit manipulative. In future, Peer Tube might implement something like dedicated sections for vertical videos. But without a significant cultural shift, I'm not seeing an effective Tik Tok clone appear without a lot of noses being turned up.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

using both Torrents and Instance data storage

IMO, anything based on peer-to-peer sharing is a nonstarter, not with the kind of video bandwidth demands that a TikTok or equivalent would put on cell phone networks. You might get it working on desktop, but I'd bet good money that the cell networks & Apple & Google would move to lock that s*** down ASAP.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Torrents have been around for over 20 years and most of the time infamous for its abundance of "linux distros". Citation needed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sure, but people generally aren't downloading torrents on cell phones. Apple devices make it very difficult (torrent clients are explicitly excluded on Apple Store for iOS), and while you can get torrent clients on the Google store, people aren't using them for live video as far as I know.

Cell phone TOS usually explicitly prohibit peer-to-peer sharing, and I got my so-called "unlimited data" Sprint service cancelled back in 2010 for exactly that.

As long as peer-to-peer on phones is rare, nobody will notice, but if somebody spun up a competitor to TikTok that depended on serving video FROM phones to the rest of the Internet, and it started to get significant traction, I think the cell phone companies would bring an end to it.

most of the time infamous for its abundance of “linux distros”

What the heck does that have to do with watching viral videos on cell phones? We're talking about a competitor to TikTok. With respect, Linux is like 3% of the desktop market, anything happening on Linux endpoints is noise to the big players.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Solid response.

What the heck does that have to do with watching viral videos on cell phones? We’re talking about a competitor to TikTok. With respect, Linux is like 3% of the desktop market, anything happening on Linux endpoints is noise to the big players.

The bitTorrent protocol is infamous for piracy, in fact you'll hardly find a common man who doesn't equate the two together (hearing torrents = pirated media) Even with the full copyright cartel doing their damnest, it's still available world wide. Also, video streaming on mobile data is everywhere and ISPs responded by fattening up their networks with newer, better, faster tech, like 4g/5g.

Your concerns are reasonable, though there is no precedent. Might be, might not be. Hard to say when one lacks the rulebook.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

video streaming on mobile data is everywhere and ISPs responded by fattening up their networks with newer, better, faster tech, like 4g/5g

Yeah, but streaming from your phone to a streaming service, or whatever, hands over the job of distribution to the streaming service.

Streaming may be 'everywhere' but how many phones are streaming at any given moment? 0.01%? It's probably not even that many. Now how many are watching TikTok? How much more bandwidth would they need if the TikTok client was also serving videos to other TikTok clients?

Now, could you obfuscate the video with encryption, etc. to make it nearly impossible for cell phone companies to stop it? Probably. But, you'd need the cooperation of the Google Play & Apple stores to make that happen (on non-rooted devices), and it seems likely they would take the side of their cell provider partners.